Worse Than Trump: The American Plantation

Copyright © 2018 Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-5439378-8-6

Front cover illustrations by Aaron M. Maybin.

Book design by Nikiea Redmond.

Printed by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, in the United States of America.

www.lbsbaltimore.com

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Reflections on New Activism

Chapter 2: Recovering Hotep

Chapter 3: White Supremacy and the Democratic Party

Chapter 4: The Baltimore Uprising

Outro: Collection of Past Essays

Acknowledgments

TThere are three people that I need to thank for the intellectual gifts that have allowed me to be an effective advocate for Black liberation.

The first person I need to thank is Jill P. Carter. I am fortunate to have her as a mentor in the political sphere here in Baltimore. She is a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates who was on the forefront of many social justice issues in Baltimore politics. She was the most vocal opponent of former mayor Martin O’Malley’s Zero-tolerance Policy in Baltimore that resulted in massive illegal arrests.

She is an extension of the Black radical tradition. She is the daughter of Walter Carter who was a giant of Black Freedom struggle in Baltimore during the 1960s and 1970s. He was a strong advocate for Black self-determination, a key figure in the desegregation of Gwynn Oak Park in Baltimore, and a leader in administering the model cities program here in Baltimore that was designed to deal with poverty and so much more. Even though Jill was very young when her father died, the magnitude of his legacy and the influence that he had on many people instilled in Jill a grounding in Black Freedom struggle.

Her wealth of knowledge and experience with confronting the racism of the Democratic Party helped me to understand the symbolic gestures that many elected officials make at caring about the conditions of Black people. This is one of the most powerful tools that is used to maintain the system of White supremacy.

The second person I need to thank is Daryl E. Burch. He is one of the most successful Black debate coaches in the activity of policy debate. I met him when I was 19 years old. He is from Louisville, KY, and was the architect of the arguments that helped the University of Louisville produce Black debaters that successfully challenged the racism that is embedded in the activity of policy debate.

My college debate partner, Deven Cooper, debated for two years at the University of Louisville before transferring to Towson University to debate with me. Burch moved his entire life from KY to Baltimore in order to help Deven, and I win a national debate championship. This move cost him a lot, including his financial security. In 2008, Deven and I had become the first team of Black debaters to win a national college policy debate championship. Burch provided me with my fundamental intellectual framework that guides so much of my work today.

Lastly, I have to thank my mother, Karen Love (Williams). When I was born, the doctors told her that I would have significant mental developmental challenges. She was determined to make sure that I was not going to any have challenges, and so as a 17-, 18-, and 19-year-old mother, she made sure I could read by the time I was three and a half years old. I remember when she would make me sit on the floor for hours and do flash cards of letters, numbers, and words. I remember being really annoyed and angry that I had to spend hours on flash cards, but it was that time and effort that she put into making sure that I could read at an early age that is the foundation for all the learning that I have done since.

Introduction

Black people are the solution to our own problems. Unfortunately, Black people have participated in political alliances and formations that are exploitative. Whether it is the Democratic Party, the so-called Left, or the nonprofit sector, Black people have volunteered our human, social, and financial capital in exchange for being mere appendages of other people’s political operations. Black people continue to do this because we have been socialized in a post-Civil Rights environment where Black scholars, academics, and mainstream contemporary activists are exposed to narratives of Black empowerment that emphasize petitioning White people to give us freedom instead of Black people focusing on our own institutional power building. The purpose of this book is to encourage Black people to engage in Black empowerment from the vantage point of building autonomous Black-controlled grassroots-driven infrastructure instead of continuing to rely on our connection to political power and infrastructure that we do not control, own, and operate.

Black people who happen to be in close proximity to the kind of powerful White people who deem themselves sympathetic to our suffering, are the Black people who seem to be most empowered in the public mainstream to be articulating our path to freedom. Black people who are situated in White institutional formations are in the position to not only drive the discourse but set the political agenda as it relates to Black people. This dynamic has two major implications for today’s Black Freedom movement, both having to do with the fundamental issue of power.

First, this dynamic discourages Black people from building the necessary collective institutional power to produce authentic power and autonomy. The more we rely on the perceived authority of White institutions to determine which Black people and ideas are legitimate, the more this allows for White institutions to solicit resources in the name of being concerned about Black people. This trades off with resources that would otherwise be directed to Black institutions. The question of what constitutes a Black institution is important. It is not as simple as having a Black person being in a leadership position of an organization that makes it a Black institution. There have been approaches to this question of Black institutions that have allowed people to describe Black empowerment as essentially an endeavor to create more Black wealthy individuals and to have more individual Black people in positions of power. Ideally, a Black institution is an entity by which the mechanisms of power rests in the hands of Black people who are representative of the communities that organizations seeks to serve. Of course, there are variations of this. Some organizations have Black CEO’s and a majority White board of directors. Some organizations are all Black, but do not have people in the leadership of the organization that are representative of the community that they serve. There is no absolute line that delineates an organization that is truly an ideal Black institution. The idea that the ideal Black organization is one that has mechanisms of accountability to the community that it seeks to serve is a good guiding principle for how we should conceptualize Black institutions. Again, a Black face does not make an organization an ideal Black institution, it must also demonstrate mechanisms of accountability to the masses of Black people. Moving forward, when I use the term Black institution, I am referring to the ideal stated above.

Going back to describing the problem with White institutions that are able to decide which Black people are legitimate thought leaders of Black empowerment; a simple way to think about this is that if Harvard (or any other White institution) is recognized as having the best Black scholarship in the world, then this becomes a way that Harvard can get more resources and social capital which enhances White institutional power to influence the condition of Black people. Whereas those resources and social capital should go toward Black institutions so that we can build our capacity to influence the condition of Black people. I do not believe that this dynamic is perpetuated primarily because of some sinister effort to undermine Black power (though there is a lot of that). There is a fundamental strategic short-sightedness that animates the decision made by many Black people who proclaim to be working toward Black liberation and empowerment to pursue a focus on White institutional access at the expense of Black institution building. There are short-term benefits that materialize when acquiring access to White institutions. This includes things like high-paying jobs, access to the corporate mainstream media, and other social perks. White institutions have the luxury of having high levels of liquid capital and large social and political influence that they can offer individual Black people access to in exchange for their work in service of building the viability of that particular White institution. The contrast to that is building a Black institution that likely has less access to capital and must often fight tenaciously in order to be recognized as legitimate in the sphere that it is working. Building an authentically independent and accountable Black institution requires tremendous sacrifice in the short term that can seem to overshadow potential long-term benefits. Once a Black institution is off the ground and is sustainable, it provides a level of freedom that cannot be replicated inside a White institution. It allows us to truly operate on our own terms and to deal with White civil society from a position of strength. It seems to me that many prominent Black folks have made the decision to accept the short-term benefits of focusing on their access to White institutions for their own personal and professional benefit, at the expense of making the short-term sacrifice for long-term Black independence. I will elaborate on this observation throughout the book, but one clear example of evidence of this is the lack of emphasis on building independent Black institutions in many public conversations about addressing the condition of Black people. To be clear, my argument is not that no Black person should exist within White institutional arrangements that would be impractical, but that we should operate within them from the perspective of how to extract what we can from them to build Black autonomy. Too often Black people see access to White institutional power as the end, instead of access as a means to an end toward Black autonomy.

Secondly, the effect of having White people influence which Black people are deemed experts on Black liberation is that it reproduces intellectual inquiry based on the notion of Black inferiority. For example, much of the popular Black scholarship emphasizes Black suffering and oppression as the primary narrative that is used to talk about Black people. The increase in scholarly interest in things like mass incarceration and police brutality render Black people primarily as suffering people. This reproduces an understanding of Black people as a people in need of saving. The prevalence of this kind of narrative crowds out the emphasis of seeing Black people as producers of the ideas and institutions that can address our problems. More simply put, having White people and their institutions determine which Black scholars are deemed experts perpetuates the dynamic where the kind of solutions and narratives that are most widely circulated are the ones that omit or crowd out Black people’s ability and capacity to solve our own problems. This gives way to the kinds of narratives that allow White people and their Black appendages to represent Black people merely as other people’s thought experiment instead of a people that can liberate themselves. In order for Black scholars and intellectuals to gain access to the White mainstream, they typically must use intellectual frameworks derived from works canonized by European/American institutions. What often happens in practice is that Black people will become well read on the intellectual traditions of White people and then will incorporate the ideas of Black scholars who use those same scholars as their frame of reference. This means that Black scholars and intellectuals often uses the intellectual constructs of White people to interpret Black life. For instance, a basic literacy in Marxism is often a prerequisite for being taken seriously in the mainstream academic universe. Karl Marx’s analysis of class was based on urban Germany and London. Unfortunately, his analysis has become a foundational framework to interpret historical phenomena in places that have different social and cultural context. This has produced a tendency to universalize the nature of class dynamics across historical and cultural lines that create misunderstandings about other cultures. For example, in Cheikh Anta Diop’s book Civilization or Barborism, he describes the two cradles theory. This theory says that in northern climates (Europe) where there were scarce resources and were colder, a cultural ethos was produced that was inherently competitive, brutal, and xenophobic, whereas in warmer climates (Africa), where there was a greater abundance of natural resources, produced a cultural ethos of cooperation, reverence for life and was xenophilic. This theory helps us to explain why European nations have engaged in global imperialism in the brutal and dehumanizing manner that they have. This is departure from the classical Marxist analysis that would reduce the European (and American) domination of the world to a manifestation of class conflict. In mainstream academic spaces, arguments from people like Diop are considered pseudo-scientific and are often dismissed because his ideas are not connected to a body of work that is understood as an extension of the cannon of acceptable (White) intellectual ideas. Many of our Black scholars who were incubated and socialized in autonomous Black grassroots formations are often framed out of the mainstream. The importance of Diop’s argument is that it is an example of a Black person who is rigorously studying Black people, to develop a cogent theory that better helps us understand the system of White supremacy without